1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to online deals and incentives.
2. Background
For many years, customers have been able to shop for products and services. Traditionally, a customer has been able to purchase a product or service from a merchant. The merchant may occasionally offer discounts on their products and/or services. Such discounts may benefit customers with lower prices, and may benefit merchants by enabling increased sales volumes, enabling excess inventory to be reduced, and providing further benefits.
In recent years, the Internet has provided a new medium for customers to purchase products and services from merchants. For example, thousands of electronic commerce websites such as amazon.com, provided by Amazon.com, Inc. of Seattle, Wash., and ebay.com, provided by eBay Inc. of San Jose, Calif., have been established that sell products and services over the Internet. The availability of products and services for sale over the Internet has made shopping more convenient for customers and enabled merchants to reach larger numbers of customers.
Some websites have recently been provided online that provide commercial offers for discounted products and services to groups of users. Examples of such websites, referred to as “deal sites,” include www.groupon.com provided by Groupon, Inc. of Chicago, Ill. and livingsocial.com provided by LivingSocial Inc. of Washington, D.C. These deal sites typically email commercial offers in the form of coupons. A deal site typically emails a coupon to members of the deal site, and the coupon is activated if a predetermined minimum number of persons sign up for the deal offered by the coupon.
Such deal sites have disadvantages. For example, users that are members of deal sites receive large numbers of emails continuously from these deal sites, which in some cases amounts to multiple emails received from a single deal site each day. The users spend time reviewing each of these received emails in the hopes that they may find a relevant deal. Furthermore, such deal sites currently target users with deals that are not relevant to the users, or are based on basic user characteristics such as demographics or city-level locations. As such, the inboxes of users become very full and cluttered with deal-related emails that the users may or may not be interested in.